VALA Story
Visual Arts/Language Arts (VALA) Project´s mission is to envelop children whose lives are dismally restricted and subject to violence and poverty with a sense of inspiration from the visual and performing arts. Our purpose is to bring artists and writers to public elementary schools in West Contra Costa and Alameda counties to give children who are largely English Language Learners the impetus to write creatively about their lives. We have a vision of linking children's impoverishment to new possibilities of expression and vitality. VALA Project also trains teachers and guest artists in an innovative, cross-cultural, generative approach to teaching that emphasizes writing within the artistic process.
VALA Project comprises a wide range of visual and performing artists who are training to weave poetry into the mix of all the arts. We confront many children and youth who have a lot of trouble reading and writing, and, through teaching mostly contemporary poets, we make writers out of non-writers and readers from non-readers. We work at including the classroom teachers in the process of this transformation, as well as giving them tools to integrate the arts into their literacy curriculum and make teaching in general a more creative act.
Founded in 1995 by artist, writer and educator Bettina Rotenberg (Tina). VALA Project since 1996, has been working with East Bay public elementary and secondary school children and their teachers, and employing artists from the full spectrum of the Bay Area arts community. There is a broad spectrum of the arts: poetry, bookmaking, shadow theater, puppetry, Congolese dance, and paper making, music, dance, yoga, painting, sculpture and collage,
ceramics, et al.
In 2002, Oakland and Richmond introduced a district mandated literacy curriculum, called "Open Court Reader". It is both very time consuming and rigidly structured. VALA, funded by the West Contra Costa Ed Fund, conducted a series of workshops for Richmond teachers to do programs linked to Open Court themes. VALA Project's primary emphasis in West Contra Costa is now the professional development of classroom teachers. In Oakland, we are beginning to mentor adolescent apprentices to co-teach elementary school children with VALA artists.
Our founder, Tina Rotenberg, is both a poet and an artist and works in both media separately and together. With a B.A. from Harvard University, M.Ed from Lesley College in Expressive Arts and a PhD from the University of California, she has taught art and writing to children in a variety of settings, including an open classroom school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a school for autistic children in Boston, Massachusetts, an
International Youth Cultural Center in Jerusalem, Israel, the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California and many VALA schools in Berkeley, West Contra Costa, and Oakland. She has also taught literature and art to college students and adults at UC Berkeley Extension, Mills College, New College of California, and the California College of Arts and Crafts.
You can read Tina in her own words describing the VALA Project process in her essay, "The Verbal-Visual Nexus: Artists-in-Residence Teach Writing" in the anthology Third Mind; Creative Writing through Visual Art, edited by Tonya Foster and Kristen Prevallet, published by Teachers & Writers Inc., NYC, 2002. Available at Small Press Distribution, Berkeley and other booksellers. She has also just completed a book about VALA and its artists' evolution into teaching poetry, called "I Dare to Stop the Wind: challenging children in the public schools through the arts and poetry." VALA´s Advisory Board has been in existence since April 1996. Its current members are: Annie Hallatt, artist and activist, Berkeley; Stephen Tobias, lawyer, Oakland; and Caterina Rindi, former arts magnet coordinator at Nystrom School, WCC.
VALA Programs
VALA's pioneering work in West Contra Costa is culminating this year with a focus on training elementary school classroom teachers in the arts and poetry so they can feel more motivated to weave in these art forms with their teaching of literacy.
This fall we started a new project in Oakland, training VALA artists as mentors for high school youth to teach children collaboratively with them in Oakland elementary schools.
